Analysis on IT trends and competitive strategies, with emphasis on micro processors, computer systems and networks. Based on latest news, backed up with real data, this site intends to provide a true and realtime picture of the fast changing IT landscape. This journal strives to be accurate on facts and sharp on criticisms. You may email your opinion to sharikou@yahoo.com or post comments here, be cool and intelligent.

About Me

Freelance journalist on IT matters. Some of my writings have been published on online IT journals. Any original content on this journal is Copyrighted, but it's free for non-commercial use. Any Trademarks used on this site belong to their respective owners. Some of the pictures are links. If there is any issue with the content of this site, please email sharikou@yahoo.com .

Tuesday, December 24, 2013

The genie is now out of the bottle

"The shorts are playing with fire," says one Seeking Alpha reader. Yes. They totally misunderstood and underestimated AMD, which has the broadest and greatest IP assets in the WHOLE semiconductor industry. No other company on the planet can match AMD in terms of IP wealth and innovation. For years, Intel spent huge amounts of cash to suppress to contain AMD. Intel paid billions of dollars to the vendors for not using AMD, while copycatting all the AMD innovations-- from x64 to multi-core. Containment failed. The genie is now out of the bottle.

In the new chip-convergence era, the world finds that AMD and ONLY AMD has all the necessary IP blocks by itself. 64 bit server strength compute (AMD64, ccHT, IMC), GPGPU, Fabric and the architecture to link these together. Micorosoft and SONY chose AMD not because they love Intel+Nvidia less, but because ONLY AMD has the technologies. Both Intel and Nvidia are essentially on-trick-ponies in a convergence world.

AMD's wins in the PS4 and XB1 are just the beginning.Shorts@AMD can expect to lose a USD$5.5 billion total.

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Litecoin Millionaires-to-be are flocking to the mine

Ordered four AMD R9 290s last night, there were five in stock, quickly made an order, and got the following message in the morning:

****************************************************************AN IMPORTANT MESSAGE ABOUT YOUR ORDER

We're sorry, but although your order was in stock at the time it was placed, it is now out of stock and cannot be shipped at this time. We regret any inconvenience.****************************************************************----------------------------------------------------------------Order was entered on Wednesday, December 11, 2013Items Ordered---------------R9 290 4GD5 MSI Video Card R9 290 4GD5 Hawaii Pro 4GB DDR5 PCIE3.0 Retail [MSTI0J1] - (Qty 4)- Was originally in stock, but is now out of stock.----------------------------------------------------------------

Why?

You could get rich quick by mining Litecoins. An AMD R9 290 can mine 15 Litecoins in a month, that's over 600 USD of value, minus 100 or so electricity cost, the profit is about $500/month. With 20 such GPUs, the profit becomes $10,000/month.

Quick road to six figure income without any education requirement.

Both Xbox One and PS4 should be very good mining rigs if software is available. I wonder AMD Mantle could improve mining power.

Friday, December 06, 2013

The New Compute Metric: Price-Per-Coin

The new performance metric for the compute world is now Price-Per-Coin.

In case you haven't noticed, high end AMD Radeon GPUs are getting increasingly hard to find and ever more expensive. I just found this out this hard fact this morning when trying to gather the parts for a Litecoin miner. A single Litecoin is worth about $40 right now, and the Litecoin market is more than one billion dollars.

My old AMD 6770 GPU can only mine one coin in 15 days or so. I need something powerful.

Go to https://litecoin.info/Mining_hardware_comparison, and you will see the relative performance of GPU miners. You buy hardware based on the Price-Per-Coin metric if you want to have a good profit margin as a miner. AMD is more than 2x faster than Nvidia. Intel Haswell is about 10% of AMD and can be totally ignored.

BTW, Litecoin is designed to be prohibitively expensive to mine with ASIC.